In praise of politicians

12:00AM BST 29 Oct 2000

THOSE who believe blame and retribution to be essential disciplinary mechanisms in the amoral world of public affairs have been disappointed by the mildness of Lord Phillips's criticisms of former ministers over their handling of the BSE crisis.

Variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human form of BSE, is an horrific affliction, which has killed more than 80 people; according to some experts, it may kill many more.Ministers and officials were slow to react to evidence of a connection between vCJD and BSE-infected cattle and of practices in the livestock industry which were the root of that connection. Inter-departmental rivalries and Whitehall's culture of secrecy contributed to the problem.

Yet the worst that can be said of the Conservative ministers involved - even John Gummer, with his notorious attempt to force his daughter to eat a beefburger for the cameras - is that they tried to strike a balance between causing public panic which would bring the beef industry to its knees and finding appropriate safeguards to deal with an uncertain health risk, which seemed at the time less significant than many other unregulated daily threats to life and health.

Acting under pressure, Mr Gummer and his colleagues struggled to find forms of words which expressed this dilemma. Perhaps, as human nature is inclined to do, they erred on the side of optimism, hoping that the almost infinitesimal statistical incidence of vCJD among beef consumers indicated a problem that would go away, rather than the seed of the epidemic which the most pessimistic scientists still expect. As the issue became a matter of widespread public concern, incoming Labour ministers erred in the opposite direction, with Jack Cunningham's damaging and unnecessary ban on beef on the bone, and an absurd order from Frank Dobson, as health minister, to destroy contact lenses which might have come into contact with glycerin derived from infected cattle.

But neither set of ministers could be accused of committing an act of evil. They did not, for example, show the kind of contempt for public wellbeing which was evident in the 1985 French blood scandal - in which potentially HIV-infected blood products continued in use for months after a reliable American contamination test became available, because officials and ministers insisted on waiting for a French test to be developed. The French government's handling of its own BSE crisis - now revealed to be much more serious than was first admitted - seems likely to expose similar depths of cynicism and deception.

By contrast and happily for us, British Government ministers are on the whole decent, well-intentioned and uncorrupt. But they have neither the time nor frequently the intellectual equipment to form perfectly-phrased judgements on volumes of complex scientific evidence. They rely on what advisers tell them, and they communicate their preferred version of that advice to the wider public in gestures and sound-bites which can all too easily be held against them afterwards. They never feel able to say - though it is implicit in all decisions about health and safety - that there is a point at which risks of large-scale disruption of economic activity by over-regulation outweigh small statistical risks to human life.

They are constantly required to respond to swings of public mood, however illogical. In the case of the Hatfield train crash that means a shift, within a fortnight, from demands for urgent action to make the railways safe whatever the cost, to expressions of outraged concern at the disruption to services caused by urgent safety repairs. So it is not easy to be a minister, and on occasion it is fair to give them the benefit of the doubt. Though it is often their own vanity which gets them into trouble, they are at the mercy of journalists who are free to be sanctimonious and vindictive, yet have never themselves been called upon to make judgements which affect anyone's life or death.

Ministers are also increasingly at the mercy of judicial inquiries, exercising the wisdom of hindsight in microscopic detail and to Olympian standards of perfection against which the hurly-burly of daily politics is rarely likely to stand up. Lord Phillips, however, has been merciful. In a matter as complex as BSE, which demanded wisdom and foresight far beyond what might be expected of any all-too-human minister, he was right to be so.